‘In the world’s other wealthy nations, systems are set up such that paid parental leave is guaranteed, taking the burden of these difficult choices off women.’
Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

That women make 80¢ to every dollar that men make in the United States is often cited as a fallacy by critics of feminism, and for once it seems that they were right – new research indicates that the gender pay gap is much bigger than previously accounted for. While the difference is usually calculated based on how much money men and women respectively make working full-time over the course of a year, the new data from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research takes a look at women and men’s income over 15 years.

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They found that over this time span, women make on average 49¢ to every dollar that men make – yes, less than half. And the reason is simple: women are more than twice as likely than men are to leave paid work to look after their children, or their ageing parents, or both.

The problem gets worse – unsurprisingly – the longer that we drop out of the workforce. Men and women who take a year out suffer approximately the same penalty to their income, but women who stay at home for four years are paid 65% less than other women who continued working, whereas men who drop out for the same amount of time make 57% as much as other men who don’t take the same amount of time out.

Child-rearing and eldercare can be outsourced, it’s true, but only at extortionate cost: 33% of American families spend 20% or more of their annual income on paying other people to look after their kids. The cost of daycare for adults – the least expensive option, compared to at-home health assistance or assisted living facilities – is comparable to the cost for little ones, and parents who are having children in their 30s and early 40s are increasingly faced with dealing with both of these responsibilities at once.

Women who stay at home for four years are paid 65% less than other women who continued working

Caring for loved ones is not easy. It is often grueling and thankless and involves a lot of getting covered in other people’s vomit. Yet for many women it also feels more compelling to outsource the job to others so that we can do other kinds of work, whether that’s because the experiences of pregnancy and birth make it feel more urgent or because we feel cultural pressure – and there is so much cultural pressure – to put our families first. Or simply because we do the math and find that it’s going to cost us much of our incomes in order to keep working while paying for childcare in the short run, even if in principle staying at work will make us wealthier in the longer term, because returning to work with a multi-year entry in your CV about looking after your family is not an easy undertaking.

In the world’s other wealthy nations, systems are set up such that paid parental leave is guaranteed, taking the burden of these difficult choices off women, permitting men to take time out as well, and creating pathways for women back into work with state-subsidized childcare. Not so in these great United States, where women are guaranteed no paid parental leave by federal law. None at all.

Will we ever achieve pay equality so long as the hardest work at home is disproportionately taken on by women? Certainly not under our current “pro-life” regime, which takes the position that women should be forced to give birth but that employers should not be compelled to give them any support in terms of paid leave since that would impinge on corporate freedom; the best they have to offer is Ivanka Trump’s proposal that family leave should be funded out of future social security income would guarantee that millennials will die of old age at work because of postponed retirement.

So long as we purport to care about gender equality, we need to take a look at how we treat women who look after their family members: setting up women for success as mothers and workers doesn’t just take a village. It requires the support of a nation.